How COVID-19 Changed SPOILER’s Death Scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home

February 1, 2022, 12:46am

When you start writing for Marvel Studios, you never know what your day is going to look like. The outfit consistently rewrites the scripts to its films, churning out pages on the fly. Thanks to various reshoots and test screenings, the films aren’t final until they hit theaters and things often change from the very first draft to the theatrical release. One of those moments in Spider-Man: No Way Home includes one of the movie’s most heartbreaking moments.

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Spoilers up ahead for Spider-Man: No Way Home. You’ve been warned!

At one point in the development process for the latest Spidey flick, Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) was going to be able to briefly walk away from the fight at Happy’s penthouse suite before dying in an emergency vehicle. In one recent interview, No Way Home co-writer Chris McKenna said May was to die in an ambulance until the global pandemic messed with the production.

“It was tricky [to write]. It was also tricky production-wise because we had different ideas for where the scene could take place, but because of Covid [it had to change]. We had one idea that maybe it was going to be inside an ambulance, and we had a whole version that was constructed around that, but that was not practical for shooting during Covid,” McKenna recently said to Gold Derby.

He added, “That’s the kind of thing that happens. So then we had to move the scene, physically, to another place while trying to keep all the other elements working. We had to make adjustments, and that’s the kind of thing that happens in production. So it was [tricky], but I’m glad that it turned out the way it did, and that it affected people the way we wanted — that it resonated — because it’s so important to Peter’s story and to his journey.”

Spider-Man: No Way Home is now in theaters.

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